RUSSIA: Father’s Little Watchman

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In Moscow on Aviation Day, all roads lead to Tushino. Even before dawn, thousands of streetcars and buses stream towards the huge airfield twelve miles from the city’s heart. By 11 a.m. one day last month, 500,000 people blotted out the flag-decked stands, overflowed on to nearby railroad embankments. In the reviewing stand, flanked by his Politburo, stood Joseph Stalin himself. The Soviet national anthem blared out over the plain. “Dear Comrades, Muscovites,” crackled the loudspeakers, “the festival of Stalin’s aviation has started.”

The thunder of 100 guns died away; the ragged beat of engines jockeying in formation filled the air. The first plane bore a gigantic picture of Stalin. A 96-plane formation of civilian flyers spelled out Slava Stalinu (Glory to Stalin). Twenty-five light trainers soared through a huge loop. “The famous airman Nesterov was the first to make a loop of this kind,” boasted the rich loudspeaker voice. “Stand guard over our beloved country. Glory to our youth, glory to our country.”

At a field radio, a young airman in a grey-green general’s uniform adjusted his earphones. “Guards Lieut. General V. Stalin is now at the command post,” the loudspeaker announced. “The military part of the display now starts.” Suddenly, two silvery, swept-wing MIG-15 jets hurtled across the field headed directly at each other, skidded narrowly past, shot away close to the speed of sound. Five new types of swept-wing jet fighters flashed past, outracing the banshee wail of their engines. Column after column of MIG-15s paraded over the crowd, followed by 100 four-engine Russian copies of the U.S. B29, seaplanes, amphibians, a new twin-jet naval light bomber. Nine helicopters whirled up, rainbows of parachutists floated down from huge transports.

“We are men of peace, glorious sons of our mighty country,” said the voice. “Glory to Stalin’s falcons, glory to our aviation, mightiest in the world. Glory to the creator of Soviet aviation, Stalin.”

After an hour and a half, the spectacle was over. Moscow’s citizens, tired, proud and reassured, headed for home. That night, in the Western embassies, the air attaches fleshed out their scribbled skeletal notes on what they had seen in this brief afternoon, when Soviet Russia ungloved its winged fist. By last week, their reports had been studied and analyzed by every Western government.

Golden Falcons. Discounting all that must be discounted in a carefully staged, carefully controlled performance, their reports confirm the West’s knowledge of Russia’s impressive air strength: at least 20,000 first-line planes, about 50% of them jet fighters and light bombers, the rest World War II prop-driven models. Careful estimates put Russian production at about 8,500 new planes each year, almost twice the current U.S. rate. Western intelligence has some hints of Russia’s far advanced research in supersonic speed ranges and armament; its hundreds of air bases; its large pool of tough, dedicated professional airmen.

For Lieut. General Vasily Stalin, son of the Great Comrade Joseph Stalin,* the Aviation Day he had staged was a sparkling success. Barely 30, he is the youngest general in Russia’s armed forces, a fighter pilot, and head of a topflight command: the Moscow district of the elite PVO (AntiAir Defense Command), the legendary, jet-riding “Golden Falcons,” watchmen of the Soviet skies.

A few times each year, during the air parades, Stalin’s son stands as the shining symbol of Soviet air might and flies the lead plane in the big review. But the rest of the year, Vasily Stalin is a mysterious figure. Sometimes Red newspapers interview him, but never identify him as his father’s son. A few have seen his wine-red Mercedes-Benz convertible racing through Moscow’s streets, siren wailing, and seen the police clearing a way through traffic. Others have seen him carousing in Moscow’s clubs. Only two photographs of him have ever come out of Russia.

The official histories tell little: Pilot V. Stalin commanded a fighter division (50 planes) in Poland in 1944, was commended for bravery, promoted in 1946 to major general (equivalent to a U.S. brigadier general), and to lieutenant general (equals U.S. major general)† three years later.

Inside the Kremlin. Much more can be pieced together from Westerners who have met him, and from escaped Soviet airmen who served in Poland and Germany with or under him. Their picture of Vasily is not quite so heroic. Vasily Iosifovich Dzhugashvili Stalin was bora in 1921 or 1922, probably in Moscow (no one is quite sure). Lenin was still alive. Joseph Stalin, in his middle 40s, was then Commissar of Nationalities and engaged in a bitter and bloody civil war. His first wife, Katerina Svanidze, had died four years before, and Stalin had taken as his second wife his secretary, Nadezhda Allilueva, the young daughter of an old-line Bolshevik who had once sheltered him from Czarist police. A year or so after their marriage, Nadezhda Allilueva presented her husband with a son, red-haired like his mother.

It was a strange, sealed-off world that young Stalin saw within the Kremlin’s cold walls. As his father ruthlessly hacked his way upwards, Vasily found himself more & more isolated from other children. His companions were the stern-faced NKVD sentries lining the Kremlin corridors ; his teachers, special party instructors.

For amusement, he watched the clanking military parades on Red Square or booted a soccer ball through the courtyards. Whenever he left the palace, he saw evidences of the imposed tributes of dictatorship: the three-story murals of his father throughout Moscow, the monuments, parks and buildings erected to Stalin. He saw how ordinary mortals fawned whenever his father spoke. Before long, young Vasily Stalin learned that the boss’s son could also dictate and be obeyed.

The “Dzhigit.” The night of Nov. 9, 1932 is memorable in Vasily’s life. At a Kremlin party commemorating the 15th anniversary of the October Revolution, Nadezhda Allilueva argued with her husband about a political amnesty he was postponing, and in anger threw an inkstand at him. Early next morning, the Kremlin doctor was called to Stalin’s apartment. Nadezhda lay dead on the floor. Stalin stood by, white and drawn, a pistol nearby on the desk. Nadezhda had committed suicide, he said, undoubtedly over a law exam she was studying for.

Young Vasily marched behind his mother’s coffin on the slow parade from Red Square to Moscow’s Novodevichy Cemetery. Her friends saw a thin, undersized eleven-year-old with close-cropped hair. He had been closer to his mother than to his doting but busy father; Nadezhda liked to say that he was a “real dzhigit.”*

After his mother’s death, something happened to dzhigit Stalin. At school, he turned in mediocre marks, seemed shy and sullen, interested only in soccer. When he graduated at the age of 18, he took no job, but spent his time loafing.

“Red Czarevich.” Vasily coveted the shining golden wings of the swanky Red air force pilots he saw about Moscow. His father was badgered into letting him enroll in Sebastopol’s Kachinsky Flying School, where he was treated with groveling politeness and fragile care. He never stood guard duty, ate special meals, slept apart. He smoked the finest Pushka and Kazbek cigarettes. Flying came hard, but he never got a thumbs-down. A special plane and a special instructor were set aside for the “Red Czarevich.” Finally, in the fall of 1941, Vasily won his wings.

While his classmates flew long, bitterly cold patrols at the front that winter, young Stalin sortied into Moscow. The city’s finest tailors and bootmakers were called in to pad out his spindly frame, add a bit to his 5 ft. 3 in. height. Vasily shot up to captain, major, lieutenant colonel, then colonel. He cut quite a figure in actresses’ dressing rooms.

Eventually, he got into combat. In June 1942, Colonel Stalin was awarded the Order of the Red Banner for bravery in combat, in 1944 was mentioned in his father’s Order of the Day, again for bravery. Said Pravda: “He has continually made a brilliant record in heaviest fighting.” Vasily got the Order of Suvorov, 2nd Class, and command of the 16th Air Division (50 planes), based at Dallgow Field near Potsdam. Red airmen say that he just about ran the entire 16th Air Division, since its nominal head, Colonel General Leonid Rudenko, carefully deferred to Joe Stalin’s 25-year-old.

Kittens & Shepherds. Life at Dallgow, as described by some of its participants, now in the West, sounds like a Dostoevskian debauch. They tell of drunken bouts in Vasily’s tightly guarded, 30-room villa; of his shouting rages, his wild rides in stolen cars, of cuffings, beatings and brutish practical jokes. Their stories, perhaps individually suspect, have when taken together a great deal of consistency. His first wife was dead. According to one story, she was killed in a plane crash which Vasily survived. At Dallgow he lived with Lelya Timoshenko, 21-year-old daughter of the Soviet marshal. On nights when Vasily’s chauffeur brought in a batch of girls, Koshechka (“Little kitten,” as Lelya was called) was escorted to their huge bedroom, where a picture of father Stalin looked sternly down from the wall. The master’s German shepherd, Jack, guarded her door until morning.

If the food didn’t suit him, Vasily would hurl it on the floor, stamp out, and roar away in his plane to stunt off his anger. He drank brandy and vodka in gulping draughts from breakfast until bedtime. The base soccer team, the Stalin Commandos, either in victory rode the dizzying crest of his pleasure or in defeat the depths of his displeasure.

Colonel Stalin climbed trees for a better look at take-offs and landings, on at least one occasion punished sloppy flying with a cuff from his leather gauntlets. Red airmen whooping it up in Potsdam’s nightclubs posted sentries to warn of Vasily’s approach. The colonel, they said, hated to have his boys get tipsy and make spectacles of themselves. Except for a few favored companions, anyone who got caught landed in solitary. There were private and inconsequential attempts at revenges: once the leather seats of Stalin’s car were ripped out; another time, someone heaved a brick through his windshield.

On March 3, 1946, Russian papers carried the news of Vasily’s promotion to major general. Red army men saw five-star Marshal Zhukov pop to quivering attention before one-star General Stalin. For beating up a veteran flyer, Vasily was broken back to colonel, but soon had his star back. The phone buzzed incessantly between father & son. In 1947, Vasily was recalled to Moscow. In 1948 he led his first Aviation Day air parade. In 1949, word came that he was commanding general of the jet fighters charged with protecting the Moscow district.

What next?

In spite of the unrelieved picture the refugees paint—of an arrogant, hard-drinking, whoring youth—Vasily Iosifovich Stalin is obviously something more than that. A prime product of his environment, he is shrewd, tough and fanatic. As a pilot and commander, he showed some of the skill, high spirit and reckless abandon that Russia brought against the Nazis. He lives for Communism, displays nothing but hatred for the world outside, and little knowledge of it. He believes that Russia and the Red air force are invincible. He is a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the City of Moscow. but is considered to have little interest in politics. A good bet is that he may one day be top commander of Russia’s mighty air fleet.

Should this happen, the boss’s favored son will inherit a prize air force, built up by a nation that tuned to the throb of an airplane engine almost before it knew the automobile.

First & Best. Soviet Russia now boasts that it was the birthplace and cradle of all aviation. Russian schoolchildren are taught that a Russian was the first to fly. “The gifted inventor A. F. Mozhaisky,” wrote Vasily Stalin two years ago, “built and successfully tried, in 1882, the world’s first plane—20 years before the brothers Wright.” In this doctrine, Russians also invented the first rocket (1607), the first helicopter model (1754). Young Vasily, who is no slouch on this sort of thing, has also written: “In our land were created aviation motors, high-speed and heavy multi-engine planes, the first flying boats and parachutes, aviation instruments, all-metal dirigibles, and the jet plane.”

In such a land, where the Big Lie is jet-propelled, the pilot is a cut above ordinary groundlings. He wears golden wings, gets much higher pay, better food and uniforms. The first men to become Heroes of the Soviet Union, Russia’s highest kudos, were the flyers who in 1934 rescued 104 survivors of the icebreaker Cheliuskin, crushed by an ice pack. Of the three men who have won the honor three times, two are fighter pilots,* the other is Russia’s Marshal Zhukov, an old infantry soldier, who has just returned to favor.

Today, between 3,000 and 5,000 Red transport planes fly 137,500 miles of air route. In every village there is an aviation club. Some 13 million young Russians belong to DOSAV, which teaches them how to fly light planes, how to parachute, how to tune an aircraft engine. Above all, it teaches the glories of the Red air force.

Surprise. Not much was known about the Red air force before the Spanish civil war. Most people thought that backward Russia lacked the technical skill to produce first-rate planes of its own. During the ’20s, held back by the Versailles Treaty, Germany’s Heinkel, Dornier, and Junkers plane builders set up plants in Russia and built planes for the Red air force. The Russians got their engines from the U.S.

By the time of the Spanish civil war, Hitler was putting German designers to his own use, but the Russian “volunteers” showed up with fairly good planes of their own. Tubby little Chatos and Ratas with 750-1,000 h.p. engines rose up to battle the Luftwaffe “volunteers.” They were 100 m.p.h. slower than the streaking Messerschmitts, but they had better range and could turn circles inside their heavier opponents. At Guadalajara, 125 Russian-piloted fighters routed an attacking Italian armored division, the first decisive use of tactical air force in aviation history. Soviet designers and airmen were learning.

World War II gave Russia’s Golden Falcons a chance really to spread their wings. For two years, the air forces of heavy-set Marshal Alexander Novikov took a dreadful beating. The first eight weeks saw 5,000 of Russia’s initial 8,000 planes put out of action. But Novikov kept sending more fighters up to challenge the Nazi Luftwaffe. The U.S., doing its best to help a besieged ally, sent fighters: Bell P39 Airacobras and Curtiss-Wright P-40s. Russia’s own factories were moved east of the Urals, and worked overtime to keep up. “In 24 hours,” said one manager, “these planes will be at the front killing Germans.”

Russian pilots flew like Cossacks. They liked to toss off bottles of vodka, hurtle down the runway, take off simply by hauling up their wheels. In combat, Red flight leaders flew above and behind their men to make sure no one shied away. They were never the finely honed flyers Germany had for her Luftwaffe (the average life of a Stormovik pilot was seven missions), but there were always plenty to take the place of those who died.

More important, a handful of talented Russian aircraft designers—led by Mikoyan, Lavochkin and Yakovlev—rose to the occasion, producing fighters that were rugged and maneuverable, though still second-rate planes by German and U.S. standards. The best ones were derived from Western models. But in tactical air, the defense-conscious Russians took a back seat to no one. One of the best ground attack planes of World War II, the armor-plated Stormovik, came off the drawing board of another Russian, Sergei Iliushin. German Panzer divisions called it “the black death.” In one ten-day period, the Stormoviks knocked out over 400 Nazi tanks. The Russians also learned to build planes in a hurry. By 1945, Russia’s factories were turning them out at the rate of 40,000 a year, and her first-line air strength rose to 20,000 planes.

U.S. Air Chief Hoyt Vandenberg, then Deputy Chief of Air Staff, went to Moscow to explain strategic bombing to the Russians and convince them that it was worthwhile. Today, he sighs, “maybe I did too good a job.” The Russians put on a great show of being disinterested in Vandenberg’s photos of gutted Nazi factories. “All altitudes above 15 feet over the tree tops is wasted,” they said. But in the battle for Berlin, when the Luftwaffe had already been crippled by the R.A.F. and the U.S. Air Force, the Russians proved that they had been listening. For 60 days, Russian artillery and 100 Soviet air armies (about 12,000 planes) rained down shells and bombs on Berlin, At war’s end, the Red army marched in over a city of rubble.

Coffee & Old Rags. High among the prizes snatched from Germany by the victorious Russians were the newfangled Nazi jets. Red pilots reported speeds up to 500 m.p.h., no vibration, no yawing torque.

For Russia, with its backward industry and limited oil reserves, the jets are an answer to a Communist prayer. Jets are rugged, have fewer moving parts, only a few of which have to be machined to fine piston-engine tolerances. They do not necessarily need high-octane gas, but fly on kerosene, wood alcohol, or, as one U.S. officer puts it, even “on coffee or old rags.” The NKVD was instructed to round up everyone in Germany who knew how to build jets. U.S. and British bombers had done the Russians an unintentional favor by making the Nazis push their factories deeper into Eastern Germany. A few German plane builders escaped, but 80% of the Nazi aircraft industry—then well ahead of the U.S. on jet development—was whisked behind the Iron Curtain. The Russians got Designer Sigfrid Günther of Heinkel; they moved the Junkers works to Kuibyshev. The V-2 laboratories and factories at Peenemunde were carted away to help Russian rocket research. Dozens of the new Messerschmitt-262 jet fighters were shipped off to Russia.

Nenes & Rooster Tails. After the war, Russia’s master of tactical air power and air force chief, Alexander Novikov, was fired and jailed. Just about that time, Russia turned more attention to heavy bombers, even separated its air force from ground command (it has since been returned to army control). The new air boss was a shining party light, 46-year-old Marshal Konstantin Vershinin, Hero of the Soviet Union, and one of the top World War II commanders. His orders were to get going on jets. Russia’s designers had proved that they could build conventional planes; now with German help they proved that they could build first-rate jets. In 1947, the first really topnotch Russian fighter, the jet MIG-15, appeared. It had a high rooster-like tail, a barrel-like fuselage, and an ancient radio antenna jutting out into the slip stream. But it had swept-back wings, quick visual proof that the Russians and their German experts had been delving deep into transsonic research. It was light and maneuverable and powered by the best existing jet engine, the Rolls-Royce Nene, which the British government sold to Russia.

Today, even better jets are coming out of Russia’s 25 main aircraft plants. How fast can be gauged by Russian willingness to send large numbers of MIG-15s to Korea. Half of the 1,000 planes in the Chinese Red air force are MIG-15s.

How good are the Russian jets? The only one U.S. pilots have met is the MIG-15, and they treat it with respect. Nothing can catch it except the U.S. F-86 Sabrejet, and then only under 30,000 feet. It has a more powerful engine, is lighter, more maneuverable, can climb faster than the F-86. U.S. pilots have knocked the MIGs down with shooting-gallery precision, partly because U.S. pilots are better trained, have the advantage of a much better electronic gunsight. Even so, every once in a while, a special flight of red-nosed MIGs scrambles up from Antung across the Yalu. They are the first team. Then, say the Sabre pilots, there is “one grand hassle.”

Hard Lesson. Good as they are in fighters, the Russians still have a long way to go before they can count a well-rounded air force. Hoyt Vandenberg’s lessons on strategic air power have been hard to learn. Air Force Chief Vershinin has been kicked out, and Colonel General Pavel Zhigarev is now belatedly building up Russia’s heavy bomber fleet.

The Reds have about 1,000 heavy bombers, mostly direct copies of a number of U.S. B-29s that made forced landings in Siberia in World War II. The B-29s yielded the Russians their design plus the Norden bombsight.* The U.S.S.R. called its well-made copy the TU-4. Unless and until the Russians pour out their new heavier bomber, they are behind the B-36, and even farther behind the new eight-jet B-52 bomber, which, when it gets into production, will be able to hit Russia from 50,000 feet at 600 m.p.h. in any weather. The Russians also lack the vast U.S. battle experience in bombers.

Hampered Falcons. The Red air force’s second big deficiency is electronics. Gunsights on their best fighters are still World War II types, and their radar, based on U.S. lend-lease sets and captured Nazi equipment, is out of date. Production is slow, even though the entire Soviet electronics industry is geared for war and not for TV sets. There is only a thin screen of radar stations along Russia’s borders. Facilities are lacking for training the necessary operators and maintenance men. In electronics, Russia is a long way behind the West. That is why at least one top U.S. planner predicts no war this year. Even the Golden Falcons of young Vasily Stalin are at a disadvantage without enough of the humming electronic tubes to lead them to a bomber overhead.

“The glorious Falcons of our Fatherland are invincible,” says Vasily Stalin, and it is just possible that the boss’s son believes this, if he is also able to believe his own boast that Soviet airmen bagged 75,000 of the 80,000 Nazi planes destroyed during World War II. Western air experts, looking over their intelligence from Russia, concede that Russia has fighters as good as any in the West, and a tactical air force second to none. Recognizing Russian weakness in bombers, and Russian inability to seal off its borders against U.S. air power, however, Western experts admit to being mighty respectful of Russian air power, but not hopelessly dejected by it.

*His older brother, Yakov Dzhugashvili, reportedly died in Germany during World War II. †The Russian progression in brass: major general, lieutenant general, colonel general, general, marshal. *Daring, brave, lively man. *The two: World War II aces Colonel Alexander Pokryshkin, 59 kills; Lieut. Colonel Ivan Kozhedub, 62 kills. Major Richard I. Bong, top U.S. ace, had 40 kills. *Now replaced in U.S. heavy bombers by improved sights, which cost $250,000 each v. an average $3,200 for the Norden.